If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
Every island to a child is a treasure island.
I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.
Has it ever occurred to you that a woman, when she is powerful, is more powerful than a man? Powerful in a different way, perhaps. Laud said: It’s a power partly based on fear. Perhaps the fear is ata...
Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.
Snapping shut his mobile, Dalgliesh reflected that murder, a unique crime for which no reparation is ever possible, imposes it own compulsions as well as it's conventions. He doubted whether Macklefie...
Daniel supposed he had a secret life. Most people did; it was hardly possible to live without one.
It had always been a part of his job which he found difficult, the total lack of privacy for the victim. Murder stripped away more than life itself. The body was parceled, labelled, dissected; address...
What do you mean by sound government?'Good public order, no corruption in high places, freedom from fear and war and crime, a reasonably equitable distribution of wealth and resources, concern for the...
Charm is often despised but I can never see why. No one has it who isn't capable of genuinely liking others, at least at the actual moment of meeting and speaking. Charm is always genuine; it may be s...
All the motives for murder are covered by four Ls: Love, Lust, Lucre and Loathing.
[Soho] is all things to all men, catering comprehensively for those needs which money can buy. You see it as you wish. An agreeable place to dine; a cosmopolitan village tucked away behind Piccadilly...
Violent death erase[s] more than the semblance of life.
You desire the end but close your eyes to the means. You want the garden to be beautiful, provided that the smell of manure is kept well away from your fastidious nose.
Our parents' generation carried the past memorialized in paint, porcelain, and wood; we cast it off. Even our national history is remembered in terms of the worst we did, not the best.
Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.
The weekend break had begun with the usual resentment and had continued with half-repressed ill humour. It was, of course, his fault. He had been more ready to hurt his wife's feelings and deprive his...
The past can't now be altered, the future has yet to be lived, and consciously to experience every moment of the present is the only way to gain at least the illusion of immortality.
It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.
Your concern would have more weight with us if you were sitting -- as you could be sitting -- on this side of the table.